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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Neon week- Palm Trees (at sunset)

Gah! Things are not going smoothly for me right now, I'd planned to have this posted way earlier in the week. However, I was rendered useless on Sunday and part of Monday by food poisoning.

Palm trees at sunet design, shade

I won't keep dwelling on my problems and instead will think of the beach, with the waves crashing, palm trees swaying and the sun going down. Are you as relaxed as I am yet? Good! Hopefully that's the atmosphere these "neon trees" capture.

Palm trees at sunset design, sun

Join me after the jump for more pictures and to find out what colors I used in this eye-searing gradient!

For this look, I started with 2 coats of Finger Paints Paper Mache. I've heard it's the best white out there when it comes to opacity. I'm still not completely convinced of its merits..yet. Anyway, once my white base was totally dry, I sponged on 2 coats of China Glaze Sun Worshiper at the base of my nails. Next, I sponged on 1 coat of China Glaze Flip Flop Fantasy at the tip of my nails. Then, I added a couple of coats of Sinful Colors Summer Peach in the middle. My last step was to sponge on more of FFF on the tips of my nails, so that it blended with the orange that was already there. Here's what my nails like before (most of) the palm trees.

For the palm trees, I used black acrylic paint that I got a while back from Michaels craft store. Acrylic paint is great for nail art because if you mess up and need to "erase" your work, you can do so easily by wiping you nails with some alcohol. It's much less time consuming than having to polish everything all over again.

Word to the wise: don't use a dotting tool for your drawing like I did. The tool itself drew fine, but when I "erased" a tree and wanted to start over, the sharp nature of the dotting tool had scraped into the polish. So I had to make sure to redraw my tree so that it covered up the messed up area. I used the dotting tool because I had lost my paint brush, I know for next time that a good fine detail brush is imperative (and not scratchy)!

Finally, I wanted to include a picture that is a bit distorted, but is probably the most accurate color representation of the neon polishes I used.

Even though it took me a while to get this post up, I hope you enjoyed my palm trees. They were one of the designs I knew I wanted to do before summer ended, so I'm glad I got a chance to finally post them. I'm really happy with the colors in my gradient and that the design came out as nice as what I imagined in my head!